311 Recent Stories

Instagram didn't start out as Instagram. It started out as … Burbn. Kevin Systrom, the creativity researcher Keith Sawyer explains, was a fan of Kentucky whiskeys. So when he created a location-based iPhone app -- one driven by the success of network...

ASPEN, Colo. -- During a session on freedom of speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival, hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, Facebook's Head of Global Policy Management, Monika Bickert, was asked about the emotion-manipulation study that has be...

London musician Aleksander Kolkowski is giving new life to a dying musical format -- by turning it into an even older format. His idea: repurpose the compact disc to play like its musical predecessor, the vinyl record. “I’m taking the optical digital...

Suppose you're a planetary scientist. You operate an unmanned spacecraft, surveying a distant moon in our solar system. Years of funding, engineering work, and long-distance space travel have all come together and at last this machine -- to which you...

On June 13, Netflix's VP of Edge Engineering, Daniel Jacobson, sent the following letter to the service's third-party developers: Netflix API Developers, As Netflix continues to grow internationally, the emphasis of our engineering efforts is to sati...

The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now it's marked by volleys of tweets. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) also called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Sunni militant group that seized Iraq's second-la...

"What is it about my data that suggests I might be a good fit for an anorexia study?" That's the question my friend Jean asked me after she saw this targeted advertisement on her Facebook profile: She came up with a pretty good hypothesis. Jean is an...

Perhaps the iconic image of developing-world poverty is a small collection of huts with thatched roofs. Unfortunately for those living in such places, these roofs are terrible. They leak and, when water-logged, often collapse. The grasses used to fab...

On April 7, 1986, NASA scientist Bob Farquhar sent final instructions to the International Comet Explorer (ICE), a half-ton probe that had made its way 54 million miles from Earth. It had passed through the tail of Halley's Comet only a few days befo...

Pinterest is best known as a destination where people can share affordable wedding ideas, dip recipes, and inspirational quotes pasted over photos of white sand beaches. But a small number of Pinterest users also swap how-tos on building bomb shelter...

If a fingerprint can tell someone who you are, a "breathprint" could reveal how you're doing. That's according to Raed Dweik, the doctor who runs the pulmonary vascular program at the Cleveland Clinic's Respiratory Institute. For the past two decades...

Bangladesh is known for its apparel manufacturing industry—and for the conditions faced by garment workers toiling in Dickensian factories for a dollar a day. But according to a report released Sunday, the South Asian nation has become a top hot spot...

Something unexpected happened when scientists at the University of California, Riverside, started stringing together nanoparticles of gold. The gold wasn't golden anymore. It changed colors. "When we see these gold particles aggregate, we find out ...

I wasn't actually surprised to learn that public officials in Toronto had agreed to install "smart toilets" in the city's convention center so they could analyze public, um, data. As a privacy researcher, the idea fascinated me. Only problem: It wasn...

When I power on my phone upon landing at LAX, a text message is already waiting for me: "Hi Ian, Silvercar here! We have your res at 1:00pm today. Let's roll!" Silvercar rents a fleet of silver Audi A4s at airports in Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, and...

The first astronauts who set foot on the moon were quarantined for three weeks when they returned to Earth. Scientists weren't sure what kinds of lunar germs they might have brought back with them. That level of caution may sound absurd today, but a ...

Self-driving cars, extreme life extension, and global wifi provided by weather balloons: Google makes projects that sound like science fiction into reality at its secretive research lab, Google X. And that may be exactly the problem. Google finally a...

Here's another reason to be nice to the neighbors: They might just give you a no-money-down, low-cost loan to put solar panels on your roof, and once you pay off that debt you'll get essentially free electricity as long as you own your home. Welcome ...

The next big thing in solar energy could be microscopic. Scientists at MIT and Harvard University have devised a way to store solar energy in molecules that can then be tapped to heat homes, water or used for cooking. The best part: The molecules can...

One day, some drug dealer bought a particular digital scale -- the AWS-100 -- on the retail site, Amazon.com. And then another drug dealer bought the same scale. Then another. Then another. Amazon's data-tracking software watched what else these peop...

You think Twitter is weird? Look at early print culture and the practice of what book historians call anthropodermic bibliopegy. That would be binding books in human skin. And while many of you now find the notion grotesque, the people of the 17th or...

Here it is, the tweet that ended decades of global grammatical stability and secure stylistic norms: AP Style tip: New to the Stylebook: over, as well as more than, is acceptable to indicate greater numerical value. #ACES2014— AP Stylebook (@APStyleb...

The Houghton Library on the Harvard campus holds the university's collection of rare books. Inside its walls -- in addition to objects culled from the old "Treasure Room" of Widener, the school's principal library -- you'll find Medieval and Renaissa...

It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not? Imagine other works of art in which a quarter or half of the work is repeated: a movie that shows the same 10-minute sequen...

How do you find reliable information? Back in 2005, a study in Nature concluded that Wikipedia -- at the time, a free upstart just eking its way into the Google results -- was about as good a source as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. Though it...

Drones are being used to film ski and snowboarding events at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, as you may have noticed. But the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for sports photography is far from a passing gimmick. In fact, you should expect more and more...

There aren't many U.S. government programs -- even space programs -- like Landsat. Since the 1970s, the project's satellites have continuously imaged the surface of the Earth, providing the longest-running archive of Earth observation photography. Yo...

Since the spring of last year, when the Snowden documents began to support scoops and stories, the media has had a problem: It is hard to depict the places and programs that Snowden's stories describe. It may sound simple, but it's a problem practica...

On Wednesday, GitHub announced that maps would be "diffable" -- a silly-sounding term that means much in the world of GitHub. It's a small and even long-expected feature, but an important one, and one that aids GitHub's role in the emerging ecosystem...

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